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Home  »  A Library of American Literature  »  Quatrains

Stedman and Hutchinson, comps. A Library of American Literature:
An Anthology in Eleven Volumes. 1891.
Vols. IX–XI: Literature of the Republic, Part IV., 1861–1889

Quatrains

By Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836–1907)

MASKS.

BLACK Tragedy lets slip her grim disguise

And shows you laughing lips and roguish eyes;

But when, unmasked, gay Comedy appears,

’Tis ten to one you find the girl in tears.

MEMORIES.

TWO things there are with Memory will abide—

Whatever else befall—while life flows by:

That soft cold hand-touch at the altar side;

The thrill that shook you at your child’s first cry.